The Glass Flute is a simple, lovely story, extolling the virtues of bravery, self-sacrifice and love, all of the things currently lacking in children’s television programming, which is why the show is such a hit. While the production itself is reasonably hi-tech, with ultraviolet light, glow-in-the-dark effects and several actual explosions, the story is not set in cyber-space.
The plot revolves around a young boy called Kevin (played by Shane). Kevin’s mother (Meredith) is in bed, wasting away from a romantic, fatal disease that makes her weak and soft-voiced but doesn’t have any visible nasty stuff. (Rico once said that the Flute would be more timely if the Mother puppet was actually covered in purple sores. He can be bitter sometimes.) The only thing that can save Mother is to have a bite of the Fruit of Life, which grows on a tree at the top of the mountain nearby. Mother is, of course, a widow, and therefore the only answer is for Kevin to go get it himself.
Brave little Kevin decides he’s up to the job, in spite of the fact that the mountain is full of evil characters.
“Take this for protection,” Mother says and gives him a glass flute, which has been in the family for generations. Kevin is gently derisive, saying he’d rather have a gun, but takes it, dutifully. We all know the flute is magic, because whenever it’s taken out of its leather sheath, weird unearthly music comes from nowhere.
Kevin’s adventure begins. On the way up the mountain, he meets a Cat (Meredith again) who tries to convince him that his quest is futile, and that lying around all day is much more sensible. He meets a Princess (Amber) who needs rescuing, a Woodsman (Bradley) who does the father-figure thing, and a serpent (Amber) who does Biblical temptation-acting. The flute helps Kevin make the right decisions, the Dragon (Bradley) defending the fruit is vanquished, the apple is plucked and Mother is saved. The Woodsman and Mother end up completing the requisite nuclear family, much to the delight of the Christian schools that book the show.
The Flute may sound mawkish and sentimental, but it was written by Juliet—a master. If Juliet can get reviews like “Heartwarming, a tear-jerker” out of her 1973 hit Barmaids on Parade, then a show like the Flute is, well, child’s play.
When I got upstairs, the lights were dimmed and the cast huddled on the floor like kids watching Saturday morning cartoons. They were paired off, Shane with his arm around Amber, and Bradley and Meredith snuggled together like conspirators. The blue light from the TV screen, set up in front of the “black box” of the portable stage, cast an eerie glow over their faces, which were intent and serious. Amber’s face was tear-streaked, which may have been the effects of Juliet’s script, but was more likely due to the Jason-thing. Juliet sat at the SM’s/director’s table at the back of the hall with Ruth, going over some notes.
“Police here yet?” Juliet asked quietly, as I tiptoed over and pulled up a chair.
“Nope. Tobin’s down there keeping an eye on the evidence until they get here.”
“Evidence? Polly, dear, you are too Grand Guignol for words. If the kid has drowned, it’s a tragedy, but let’s not jump to conclusions.”
“Amber said he never takes that vest off,” I whispered back. “What’s your explanation?”
Juliet made a significant grimace towards Shane and Amber.
“I’d say there was some history with those two and young Jason couldn’t handle it,” she said. “I think he threw his little SM’s vest in the water as some sort of defiant gesture and made tracks. Which,” she added, “leaves us with no stage manager.” She fixed me with a stare that made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.
“You’ve kept up your Equity membership, haven’t you, dear?”
I shivered. What had I said to Rico the night before? Touring is murder. There’s no way I’d ever do it again. Still, I blush when I lie, and Juliet knows it.
“Ummm . . . yeah. I’m still in good standing.”
“Puppet business booming, is it?”
“Not as such.”
“You’ll get two months at production stage manager rates, with a per diem and use of the Steamboat van. Now, let’s talk about the rehearsal schedule,” she said, pushing Jason’s prompt script binder towards me.
I sighed. PSMs make big bucks. The cast would hate me for taking Jason’s job when his body wasn’t even a body yet, and anyway, I hate stage management. But I had a dependent now. A mutt called Lug-Nut whose vet bills were climbing (a recent run-in with a porcupine) and whose per-month food bill was more than I get for a marionette commission.
“Write it into my contract,” I said. “My dog comes with us on tour, and I get my own room.”
“Whatever, dear,” Juliet said. “Now, perhaps you’ll go out and pick up some amp cables so we can do a sing-through this afternoon. Keys are in the van.”
Eight
MOTHER: A single note will soothe the breast / when evil puts you to the test.
-The Glass Flute, Scene ii
The interior of Fish Gundy’s Musical Emporium is very dark. There are lava lamps in every corner, though, and once your eyes get used to it, the atmosphere is quite soothing. Fish usually sits at the back in an ancient leather bean bag chair, which is elevated on a platform behind the counter so he can lounge there and still be able to reach the cash register. It gives him a Godlike aspect, which is possibly deliberate. If you buy something from him, you sort of have to look up, but if you were standing on the floor next to him, his nose would reach your sternum.
Fish hasn’t changed much since high school. When we were in Grade Nine at Laingford High together, he came to class dressed in striped bell-bottoms, a Nehru shirt and sandals. This was at a time in the late seventies when all that hippie stuff was recent enough to be excruciatingly uncool. People laughed at him, partly because of his size, but mostly because of his style. He didn’t alter it, though, which lent him a kind of weird mystique, as if he had become stuck against his will in an era the rest of us wanted to forget.
We became friends because we were both charter members of the out-crowd (Lori Pinkerton wouldn’t even acknowledge Fish Gundy—she looked right through him) and he was an incredible guitar player. Ruth and Fish and I used to hang out together in the school greenhouse at lunch and write songs. Fish’s tragedy was compounded by a terrible case of adolescent acne, which he finally overcame in Grade 13, but by then the damage had been done. Once nerd-hood is established, you can’t escape it unless you change schools. Ruth, Fish and I shared the burden of the label with all the dignity we could muster. It was only later that we were able to acknowledge that being in the out-crowd was a good thing. All the really interesting people were members.
Fish went away to university, earned a PhD in medieval music history and learned to play the shawm and sackbut. Later, he travelled, took up the sitar and mastered various unpronounceable Japanese instruments, then came back to Kuskawa and opened up his emporium in Sikwan. He’s married to a Japanese woman called Mako, and they have twins, child prodigies, both of them.
“Hey, Polly. Peace,” Fish said from his beanbag throne as I made my way through the murky interior to the back of the store. The walls of Fish’s place are studded with guitars, from ancient Rickenbackers to shiny new Fenders. He does a brisk trade-in business, and the bands that come through town on tour often re-fuel there, so there’s a collection of wildly custom-fitted electric guitars, some of them autographed by their former owners. The rest of the place is crammed with instruments from around the world. There are Bolivian rainsticks and pan pipes, a whole collection of African drums, some beat-up coronets and baritones, a bunch of Quebec-made violins (plus an old European one that he keeps locked up), a Celtic harp and a set of bagpipes. Collectors from Toronto often come up to Sikwan just to see Fish.
“How are things up in Cedar Falls?” Fish said.
“Looking up, Fish,” I said. “Spring’s in the air and I just got a paying gig with Steamboat Theatre.”
“Good for you,” he said. “Doing what?”
“Well, I wa
s the puppet designer until about ten minutes ago. Now I’ve been promoted to stage manager.”
“Cool. I thought you hated stage management.”
“Yup. But somebody bumped off the other one, so I’m filling in.”
“Seriously?”
“Well, we think so. He’s vanished, anyway.”
“Bummer,” Fish said. That’s all he said, which is one of the reasons I like him. He knew that if I wanted to talk about it, I would. I didn’t.
“I need amp cables.”
“Right this way,” he said. I followed him into the back of the shop, where he kept accessories and sheet music. We spent a half hour discussing techie-stuff, and as we were comparing the relative merits of the brands of cable available, he stopped mid-sentence and gazed up at my face.
“You do something to your hair?” he said.
“No, Fish.”
“Huh. You look different, somehow.”
“My nose. I got a nose job.”
“Oh. Cool. Suits you.” That was that. There are plenty of fish in the sea, but there was only one Fish for me. I left with the requisite gear carried in a loop over my shoulder. I would have liked to have stayed and gabbed some more, but I had a rehearsal to run. I was sure that I had wasted enough time at least to have missed Becker’s visit to the theatre, which was the whole point of the exercise. The other music shop in town was closer to Steamboat, a place down in mall-land that specialized in Hammond organs and ukuleles, but that trip would’ve taken me less than fifteen minutes.
The Steamboat Theatre van is a big Ford with one bench seat in the back and eight feet of storage behind it. This is the classic children’s theatre touring vehicle, with just enough seating space for four actors (who traditionally fight like five-year-olds about who gets to ride shotgun) and the stage-manager, who gets to drive. The set, lighting, costumes and props are packed in, wedged roof-high behind the bench seat.
Loading up the van at the end of every show means following a pattern. If you pack the gear in the wrong order, or put it in the wrong place, you can end up with a few pieces at the end that simply won’t fit. If that happens, you have to pull everything out and start over, which can be disastrous if you’ve got half an hour for lunch and another show at a school twenty kilometres away. Sometimes the technical director will issue a kind of floor-plan, like the “what’s where” directions in a box of chocolates, which gets taped to the back door of the van. After a week, the cast learns the order of the pack, and things go smoothly. The first few days, it’s hell.
If there’s a lot of travelling involved on tour, the cast quickly learns to establish ground rules for van-time. Being stuck like a thespic sardine in a five-foot by three-foot space for several hours a day is no picnic. Personal hygiene, for example, becomes very important, as does music etiquette (if you like listening to rap music, you bloody well wear a portable CD player and you keep the volume turned way down). When I told Rico that touring was murder, I was remembering vaguely how uncomfortable it could get. Now, driving the empty Steamboat van back to the theatre, it struck me full-force that I had agreed to do it again.
“I must be completely insane,” I muttered. I tuned the radio to CBC, knowing full well that once we hit the road, there would be arguments over which station to listen to and battles over volume control. Mid-tour, a fog of depression would permeate the van, as the five adults cooped up inside came to terms with the fact that they were doomed to spend another month in each other’s company. Touring is like being in a marriage with four other people. If the chemistry’s right, it can be a blast. In my experience, that happens on one out of every six shows. Long odds.
The van bounced and rattled its way along the shore road leading to the theatre. It was designed to run best with a couple of thousand pounds of equipment in the back and seemed to resent being taken out with an empty belly. I passed a couple of kids walking a dog along the shoreline, and they gave me a friendly wave. I waved back, realizing that driving the Steamboat van was sort of like wearing a clown costume. It was painted to resemble (not surprisingly) a steamboat, and there was a fake smokestack on the roof. Very cute, in an icecream-truck kind of way. Every school-aged kid in Kuskawa had seen a Steamboat show. The company began each tour with a local performance or two, to test the waters.
I parked the van in the Steamboat lot, killed the engine and reached over to grab the new amp cables, just as the OPP cruiser pulled in beside me. It was Becker and Morrison, of course.
“What are you doing here?” Becker said. This was not an unusual question, coming from him. We had enjoyed several similar encounters last fall, when my best friend, Francy Travers, had been the prime suspect in a murder case in Cedar Falls. I’d done a fair bit of meddling, and I always seemed to turn up just a little bit before the OPP did. It made Becker fratchetty.
“I work here, Mark,” I said, as pleasantly as I could.
“Oh. So it was you who called in the missing person report?”
“No. That was probably the artistic director, Juliet. Our stage manager’s disappeared, and we found his vest floating in the pool in the basement. We think he might have fallen in the river.”
“How do you know he hasn’t just gone out for coffee?” Morrison asked, coming around the side of the cruiser to stand beside his partner.
“He’s a stage manager. He’s not at rehearsal. In the theatre biz, that’s a cardinal sin. It just doesn’t happen. That’s how I know, Earlie,” I said.
Becker sighed. “That’s all we need,” he said, “a bunch of flaky theatre people.”
I smiled sweetly. “We’re not all flaky, Officer. Some of us are actually quite normal, with mortgages, morals and a healthy respect for authority. Follow me, and we’ll see if we can find one.”
We headed inside, Becker muttering behind me all the way as if I were leading him into hell. Turns out, I was.
Nine
KEVIN: Everybody tells you when you’re young how to behave/Like ‘wipe your nose, say thank you, save the world, kid, and be brave.’
-The Glass Flute, Scene iii
“You’ll probably find this useful,” I said, pulling the cast and crew contact list off the callboard and handing it to Becker on our way through the lobby. He gazed at it suspiciously, as if I’d just typed it up for him as a kind of step-by-step guide to who might’ve dunnit.
“It’s standard procedure,” I explained. “When you’ve suddenly got twenty or so new people to deal with, it helps to have a list. This is everybody who works here, what they do and where they’re staying. If you need to talk to the cast, we’re upstairs in the rehearsal space.” I introduced the policemen to Kim Lee, whose calm efficiency seemed to reassure Becker.
“You’re the one who called us?” he said.
“Yes, I did. I’m Steamboat’s general manager. Jason McMaster, our stage-manager, is pretty conscientious, and his disappearance is odd, so we thought you’d appreciate a call. You’ll want to see the shop, I expect. Polly, why don’t you go upstairs and tell Juliet the OPP is here and keep the cast occupied.” She turned to Becker with an apologetic grin. “They’re all a bit freaked out by this, officer. You know theatre people.” Well, Becker didn’t, actually, but her attitude was right in line with his own, and he grinned back at her. I felt a twinge of jealousy, which was patently ridiculous, as I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in him any more; I suppressed it as soon as I recognized it for what it was.
“Lead the way, Ms. Lee,” he said, and followed Kim to the shop stairs. Morrison rolled his eyes at me and fell into step behind Becker, doing a hunch-backed, Igor-impression. I turned my snort of laughter into a sneeze, but I needn’t have bothered. Becker didn’t even turn around.
“The cops are here,” I said, walking into the rehearsal space. Ruth was the only one there, leafing idly through Jason’s prompt book.
“Good,” she said. “The video’s over and Juliet’s got them in the wardrobe room trying on their costumes. We’ve wasted the whol
e morning and they’re getting antsy. Let’s send our fearless leader downstairs and get some work done.” I handed her the amp cables and left her to get her equipment set up for the sing-through.
There would probably be no complaints about a music rehearsal at this point. The first rehearsal day is generally a full one, scheduled to the hilt, with non-stop business and a feeling of suppressed excitement and anticipation. With only one frantic week of rehearsal before the first performance, it was essential that the first day set the tone for the rehearsal period. Wasting a morning lolling around watching videos and playing dress-up would not be good for cast morale in the long run.
“Geez, these are attractive,” Bradley was saying, surveying his rotund figure in a full length mirror. The outfits worn by the puppeteers in the Flute couldn’t exactly be called costumes. The gear was known as “blacks,” which is what they are. The idea was to cover every inch of skin, so that the actors in the black playbox would disappear completely under the ultraviolet light, and the puppets and props would spring magically into view, glowing. Both men and women wore skin-tight black body stockings and tights, with black cotton turtlenecks over top. To cover their arms and hands, they wore tight black wool gloves with elbow-length velour cuffs. The lower extremities were masked with black socks and dance slippers, and their heads were covered with black velour hoods. The hoods were the worst part. Like the rest of the outfit, the hoods left no skin exposed, and visibility was poor through the square of black screening that fell from the peak of the baseball cap around which the hood was built. The hems of the hoods were fitted with snap fasteners, which corresponded to snaps around the collars of the turtlenecks to keep the headgear securely in place. After a few minutes in full blacks, the cast of the Flute would sweat buckets.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Bradley said, sadly. “Dance tights are not my best look.” The turtleneck stretched over his belly and stopped just short of modesty, an inch or two above his crotch.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 29